10.  BONDAGE FOR CRIME.  Must innocence be punished because guilt suffers penalties?  True, the criminal works for the government without pay; and well he may.  He owes the government.  A century’s work would not pay its drafts on him.  He will die a public defaulter.  Because laws make men pay their debts, shall those be forced to pay who owe nothing?  The law makes no criminal, PROPERTY.  It restrains his liberty, and makes him pay something, a mere penny in the pound, of his debt to the government; but it does not make him a chattel.  Test it.  To own property, is to own its product.  Are children born of convicts, government property?  Besides, can property be guilty?  Can chattels deserve punishment?

11.  RESTRAINTS UPON FREEDOM.  Children are restrained by parents, pupils, by teachers, patients, by physicians, corporations, by charters, and legislatures, by constitutions.  Embargoes, tariffs, quarantine, and all other laws, keep men from doing as they please.  Restraints are the web of civilized society, warp and woof.  Are they slavery? then a government of LAW, is the climax of slavery!

12.  INVOLUNTARY OR COMPULSORY SERVICE.  A juryman is empannelled against his will, and sit he must.  A sheriff orders his posse; bystanders must turn in.  Men are compelled to remove nuisances, pay fines and taxes, support their families, and “turn to the right as the law directs,” however much against their wills.  Are they therefore slaves?  To confound slavery with involuntary service is absurd.  Slavery is a condition.  The slave’s feelings toward it cannot alter its nature.  Whether he desires or detests it, the condition remains the same.  The slave’s willingness to be a slave is no palliation of the slaveholder’s guilt.  Suppose he should really believe himself a chattel, and consent to be so regarded by others, would that make him a chattel, or make those guiltless who hold him as such?  I may be sick of life, and I tell the assassin so that stabs me; is he any the less a murderer?  Does my consent to his crime, atone for it? my partnership in his guilt, blot out his part of it?  The slave’s willingness to be a slave, so far from lessening the guilt of his “owner,” aggravates it.  If slavery has so palsied his mind that he looks upon himself as a chattel, and consents to be one, actually to hold him as such, falls in with his delusion, and confirms the impious falsehood.  These very feelings and convictions of the slave, (if such were possible) increase a hundred fold the guilt of the master, and call upon him in thunder, immediately to recognize him as a MAN, and thus break the sorcery that cheats him out of his birthright—­the consciousness of his worth and destiny.

Many of the foregoing conditions are appendages of slavery, but no one, nor all of them together, constitute its intrinsic unchanging element.